During my initial glance at the game, It popped into my mind that the Sardakk N'orr seem to be the only race that took part in the Twilight Wars and weren't invited to the party. Now after having read the rules, the difficulty of adding a seventh group into the mix and keeping the game balanced is not lost on me. That said, if they could manage to fit them in with some expansion I'd be in line to pick it up.

I second this.

Really, if any of the other races from Twilight Imperium 3 showed up, I'd be all for it.

wakertwojerk said:

I wouldn't say "any of the other races" personally. A lot of the TI3 races have background stories that say their presence - even their very existence - was not known in this sector during the Twilight Wars. This is the typical dilemma for prequel stories, of course. You have to remember what has been said about the past already.

The Mentak are a bunch of prisoners from a prison planet who eventually broke loose after the Lazax empire crumbled and left their world unguarded for a few centuries. Since the initial invasion of Mecatol is ongoing in Rex, one assumes this prison planet has not yet been abandoned.

The L1Z1X are just the Lazax transformed into some Borg-like state after their exile on the edge of the galaxy, so introducing them in Rex would be supremely fluff-breaking.

Basically all of the expansion races (here including any races that were originally expansion races in earlier editions of TI that became core races in TI3) were unknown to the galaxy at large during the time of the Twilight Wars and were only "discovered" much later in the timeline, so their involvement in one of the most important historical battles of the Lazax empire seems unlikely, to say the least.

And so on.

I'd be happy to see the N'orr, since they were known to be part of the timeline at this stage. Winnu could work, although really they're just a special division of the Lazax so I'm not sure how much sense it makes to have them as their own faction here. I could accept Yssaril, since they're a bunch of sneaky buggers who could probably keep themselves out of the history books. Muaat could work too. They're technically a slave race to the Jol-Nar in this time frame, but there was that one ambassador of theirs who visited the Emperor during the invasion (in the Shattered Empire fluff), so they could conceivably be acting behind the scenes during Rex.

Other than that, I think any other races added would be pushing the continuity though. And, sadly, the same holds true for any brand new races they might want to create. They could probably invent feasible reasons for one or maybe two new races to explain their presence in this battle but not in any subsequent events, but there's only so many times you can play that card before it gets trite.

I agree with Steve-O on this one. It might be because I'm kind of a stickler when it comes to continuity but that's as good a reason as any in my book…

They could always do like for Game of Thrones and have special expansions that basically transform the game into a different time period and replace one or two factions.

Of course, I don't know the story, so I don't know if there is another time when Rex or another planet would be fought over in this way.

It's a nice idea but I doubt it would work. Like you sniff at, no TI3 planetside battle was more epic than the Sol offensive on Mecatol Rex. It was the deathblow to the entire multimillenial Lazax Empire.

Fnoffen said:

I'm not so sure about that.

The fall of Mecatol Rex during th Twilight Wars was undoubtedly the largest and most significant battle that took place there, but that doesn't mean there have never been other big battles there. The planet remains a large, central territory to control in Twilight Imperium, so it still has strategic value to most races even in the era after the fall of the Lazax empire. It stands to reason that the planet has been hotly contested throughout the ages, whenever the Great Races weren't busy hiding in their home systems and licking their wounds from the last major conflict.

The biggest problem, IMHO, would be with faction abilities. REX, like Dune before it, has strong connections between the fluff and the faction abilities. Hacan, for example, has control of the shipping lanes primarily because of the stranglehold created by the blockade above the planet. The Hacan aren't going to have that kind of control over the space above the planet in every time frame throughout history, so moving the time frame would require re-thinking any "old" races that you still wanted to include, as well as brainstorming any "new" races you want to introduce.

Having multiple versions of the same race for different time periods would be pretty annoying, I think. Firstly, you'd have to keep track of the game components to ensure you're using the right version of the race for whichever time frame you're playing in. Secondly, it would make it difficult to remember a faction's rules if they're constantly shifting.

Of course, I have to say that this kind of "expansion" really feels more like a spin-off game. If it has to change everything to suit the new time frame, then any connection requiring the use of REX would feel liek a cheap shot to consumers. And making it a stand-alone game would, of course, mean it isn't really an expansion to REX. Like Hunters and Gatherers to Carcassonne, it would be similar but not really connected.